Uncharted

The New Landscape of Tourism Juan Elvira, David Goodman, Pablo Oriol, Roger Paez, Fernando Rodríguez, Lina Toro An IE University Undergraduate School academic experiment emphasizing the importance of architectural design strategies in the process of reformulating the tourist offering within the framework of an open debate about new models for development. The book has a two-fold objective: to explore new avenues of thought in design teaching, and to do so through research that deals with new architectural landscapes that are linked to tourism. Publishing the Undergraduate Final Projects from IE University’s Undergraduate Architecture program responds to the desire to highlight the importance of design strategies in the process of reformulating the tourist offering within the framework of an open debate about new models for development. The infrastructural nature of architectural design imbues the architect’s creative capacity with the healthy ambition of transforming the territory into new landscapes for touristic opportunities. EBOOK VERSION

Create! (ENG ED.)

Eduardo Arroyo This book shapes a thick network of experiences and crossed interests opened throughout last twenty-five years in the office NO.MAD and its founder Eduardo Arroyo. In its pages there are mixed reflections, anecdotes and creations that shape an exciting cocktail between living, thinking and creating. In some time of our physiological life something inside each one gets lost and the mind fills with doubts. In spite of the inertia of the long crossed distance, to stop and to look behind with exploratory smell can help us to enter with courage in the unknown days. Topics like the origin and the memory, the soul and the precision, the random and the instability, the empathy, the instants and the choice, the hybridization and the blurry systems, the cloning, the invisible orders and the essential complexity turn out to be here interlaced. The trip across these invisible paths demonstrates a critical vision of the world and the voluntary obligation to try to transform it from the creative independence, the determination and the valor that they are the transparent message of this book. Buy Spanish edition EBOOK EDITION

Public Space Acupuncture

Acupuncture strategies to renovate infrastructure, landscape elements and public space in cities. Helena Casanova, Jesús Hernández As the financial crisis deepens in many European countries and the construction sector remains in a slump, many plans for urban regeneration have been shelved. Cities are cutting their spending on large public works, so the time is ripe for low-cost strategies that have a positive impact on the urban habitat. One such strategy is Public Space Acupuncture, in which independent but coordinated small interventions help regenerate urban public space and city life. It is based on Zygmunt Bauman's characterization of the current era as Liquid Modernity. EBOOK VERSION

Interdisciplinary Design

Architecture and engineering are changing. But what about the relationship between architects and engineers? Hanif Kara, Andreas Georgoulias

The subject of this experimental course held at Harvard GSD, with the students of Harvard and MIT, is to see the potential of interaction between the two disciplines from these two schools. Hanif Kara of AKT, leads the class, insisting on the importance of each professional field but trying to erode the borders and boundaries between them.

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Oxymoron & Pleonasm

Conversations on American Critical and Projective Theory of Architecture Monika Mitášová 12 interviews focusing on the problem of critical and projective approach to architectural thinking and design discussed by current American theorists, historians and practitioners. Monika Mitášová interviewed an influential group of current American theorists, historians and practitioners proposing critical and projective architecture, respectively, which forms the first book that brings those perspectives together to show the state of current critical and projective theory, practice and new alternative actions of designing architecture. EBOOK EDITION

Geographies of Trash

Rania Ghosn & El Hadi Jazairy/ DESIGN EARTH In the Age of Environment, the scale waste management is geographic all while often relegating such undesired matter to invisibility as matter out of place. Geographies of Trash reclaims the role of forms, technologies, economies and logistics of the waste system in the production of new aesthetics and politics of urbanism. Honored with a 2014 ACSA Faculty Design Award, the book charts the geographies of trash in Michigan across scales to propose five speculative projects that bring to visibility disciplinary controversies on the relations of technology, space and politics. The book reclaims the materiality and spatiality of municipal solid waste systems. The research-design methodology and book structure adopt a threefold approach, 1) to conceptualize the spatial issues; 2) to chart relations of trash and space in Michigan across different scales; 3) to speculate on alternative strategies, rituals and imaginaries that reclaim trash as matter in place. Geographies of Trash proposes five situated generic architectural strategies of trash-formations throughout the American territorial grid. By making trash visible and formal, the project aspires to engage disciplinary debates on waste systems in architectural urbanism. EBOOK VERSION

Landscape Tunings (ENG ED.)

An Urban Park at the Danube Silvia Benedito & Alexander Häusler / OFICINAA Landscape Tunings maintains that landscape is more than ecology and technical performance; it is also an environment of paramount importance to one’s dispositions and wellbeing—an emotional space of social relevance, tuned with and for its communities. In this book, OFICINAA examines the design potentials of the Danube River as a civic anchor, a bioclimatic medium, and a space for collective imagination in the city of Ingolstadt, Germany. Landscape Tunings: An Urban Park at the Danube explores the city’s littoral landscapes with video-essays, drawings, walks, public installations, and exhibitions—each spotlighting the sensate-space where the city meets the Danube’s edge. It then showcases the bottom-up and tactical design approaches of the Stadt Park Donau | Donau-Loop project, which aims to foster the spatial embodiment with the riverine environments facing the present challenges of the anthropogenic era. With contributions by Günther Vogt, Andres Lepik, and Simone Schimpf, Landscape Tunings projects the role of littoral landscapes as a medium for the collective wellbeing of the city. Flowing through ten countries, the Danube is one of the most international rivers in the world. Regardless of its scale, economic output, and ecological relevance, the Danube’s landscapes act as cornerstones for civic interaction while “touching” numerous urban fabrics. Initiated in 2013, the Stadt Park Donau | Donau-Loop project in Ingolstadt derives from a three-year design study in collaboration with the various communities in the city. Rather than totalizing, and related to the key German concept of “Stimmung” (tuning of space), the design interventions are spatial tunings to foster community access, wonder and delight. These interventions intensify the particularities of the river landscapes with its distinct environments, and leverage the potentials of the riverbanks as a “thick” space in the pressing commitments to social wellbeing. The Stadt Park Donau | Donau-Loop project was exhibited at the Museum of Concrete Art and Design in Ingolstadt. The exhibition shared the multiple scopes and scales of the design, inviting the public to envision the Danube’s inherent beauty as a spatial component in the urban fabric of one the fastest growing cities in Germany. Buy German edition EBOOK VERSION

Soupergreen!

Souped-Up Green Architecture Doug Jackson SOUPERgreen! features projects and essays that offer a long overdue critique of the current approach to "green" architecture and, in turn, demonstrate a more appropriate way for architects to address the challenges posed by the environmental crisis. In sharp contrast to contemporary examples of "green" or "sustainable" architecture —which primarily rely upon the invisible agency of unremarkable technologies and materials to reduce resource consumption, but which do so without producing a necessary shift in the public's perception of the environment or behavior towards it —SOUPERgreen! demonstrates how green technology can not only perform from a measurable standpoint, but can also produce engaging experiences that profoundly alter, enhance, and transform the public's understanding of the environment. By leveraging the inherently expressive nature of technology in order to dramatize the constantly negotiated relationship between humanity and the natural world, the "souped-up" green architecture featured in SOUPERgreen! transforms "greenness" from a mere measurement of environmental performance into an actively engaged and highly conscious lived reality —resulting in a new way of experiencing and understanding the environment that is inherently more ecological. Visit urbanNext for exclusive on-line content about this book EBOOK EDITION

Time for Play

Why architecture should take happiness seriously AZC – Atelier Zündel Cristea Over the last 15 years AZC’s architectural work has developed through a diverse range of experiences. This book, Time for Play, presents exhibition pavilions, temporary installations, and ideas competitions – a mix of built and un-built projects.

“Today’s situation promotes innovation, supports creativity and enriches projects, calling on our intelligence. We are forced to take a new look at practices and uses, to consider different ways of doing things, to think about the humanity of a place; and all this when we still find it so hard to understand community needs, and even more so to keep up with changing society. Faced with a changing world, they propose solutions that are novel in their shape, use, cost and temporality. This project is realistic and realisable. The architects put their intelligence and skill not into regurgitating conventional solutions but into inventing new ones. They have left behind the stagnant reproduction of the city and shapes of the 19th century, repetition of a past time, and moved on to building in response to our times. Is this modernity? Does this project mark a new era, as did Paris Plage in 2002, or the subsequent shifting developments along the Left Bank of the Seine?” Jean-Pierre Charbonneau - 2015 EBOOK VERSION

Total Latin American Architecture

Libretto of Modern Reflections & Contemporary Works Ana de Brea This book is not about a folk or typical Latin American architecture. Latin America is not some faraway, isolated region, rather a huge and universal laboratory. It shows a different Latin America through its recent architecture, which flourishes in our time of global communications. It does have roots in the past; but does not appeal to nostalgia. Architecture thought for the present and designed for the near future. Total Latin American Architecture intends to communicate a targeted objective, to circumscribe a segment, a series of observations and actions in architecture. EBOOK VERSION

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